World-writable memory on Samsung Android phones

Oh, really? I started out in the working world in 1996. Even then 95% of the people I worked with were nine-to-fivers with no joy-in-coding at all -- and this was perhaps the peak time for skilled software development in the UK, when those of us who grew up with programming courses on national TV were just coming out of university.

Only in elite software development houses (and operating systems development is certainly elite/specialized in this sense) and in major tech clusters like Silicon Valley will you find that most programmers are in it for the joy of it, or that most programmers are particularly skilled. Outside that, it's a tool, and the people working on it largely care more about their salary than about using the tool well.